Odysseus in America (18 page)

This is no small distinction, because much still hinges today upon whose understanding of the war and its consequences becomes generally accepted Truth. Who are the masters of truth on the Vietnam War? This war lies in our midst like a dead elephant being torn apart by hyenas—who
then fight viciously among themselves for control of the nutrient-rich carcass.

The modern world has its own masters of truth, some of them very public and visible, like judges and broadcast media commentators. Others are faceless, anonymous bureaucrats who “adjudicate”
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veterans' disability claims.

Doc, both a conventional nickname for a medic and here a pseudonym, was one of two suicides “on my watch” during the fourteen years I have been the psychiatrist for our specialized intensive outpatient treatment program for Vietnam combat veterans with PTSD.

Doc volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1964, and trained at Fort Sam Houston as a medical corpsman. He then served in Germany and upon reenlistment in 1967 volunteered for duty in Vietnam. Doc arrived in Vietnam in June 1967, and was assigned to the Military Assistance Command as a medical adviser, based in a military compound in Hue City. The five-man advisory unit traveled with an ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) unit up and down Highway 1 as far as the DMZ in the north and Phu Loc in the south. These movements along Highway 1 invited repeated ambushes, mortar attacks, and mine explosions. The American advisory unit became extremely close-knit, because they found that in a firefight the ARVN abandoned them and that they could only rely on themselves. During one such ambush four of the five men on the team were hit, two died immediately and two survived, but Doc, the only one not hit, felt then and until he killed himself, that he should have kept his two dead buddies alive.

The Tet Offensive started in Hue City on January 31, 1968, with heavy rocket and mortar barrages followed by ground assaults on their compound within the city. At first light the American soldiers in the compound could see numerous Viet Cong and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) flags surrounding it. The next six days, surrounded and cut off, they went utterly without sleep under constant rocket and mortar bombardment and repeated ground assault. The incoming rounds formed the content of Doc's hallucinatory reliving experiences (“flashbacks”), triggered by firecrackers or other sharp loud noises. Three of the five U.S. medics in the compound were killed, two of them close friends. Doc recalled feeling overwhelmed by the number of casualties, and his inability to evacuate them. In particular, he was torn up by the number who died under his care, who would have lived had it been possible to evacuate them.

During the six days of encirclement, before the Americans in the compound were relieved by the marines, an episode happened that
formed the basis of the veteran's most frequent repetitive traumatic dream: He was standing next to the captain, when within a second both he and the captain were hit by snipers' bullets. Both went down together. The side of the captain's neck was ripped open and the blood spurted in Doc's face and drenched his shirt. Though wounded himself (he received the Purple Heart for this occasion), Doc carried on his duties as a medic. When the marines broke through, he refused to be evacuated and accompanied a Marine unit whose medic had been killed. This led to twelve days of house-to-house combat as the marines retook the city. There were heavy marine casualties, to whom Doc ministered under fire. He was present at the discovery of mass graves of those executed by the VC and NVA. These masses of dead and mutilated bodies also figure in his repetitive nightmares.

Doc was honored with two Bronze Stars, with the Vietnamese Cross for Gallantry, and the Army Commendation Medal for Valor, in addition to receiving a Purple Heart and the Combat Medic Badge.

Prior to Vietnam, Doc didn't drink and had never experimented with drugs, but after Tet, while still in the service, he became a heavy drinker and a steady user of marijuana and heroin to shut out grief and suppress flashbacks and nightmares. When he was honorably discharged from the Army in June 1969, he was heavily addicted to alcohol and heroin.

After discharge, Doc drifted from one menial job to another, holding and losing over fifty in twenty years. He married three times, each marriage ending because of PTSD and substance abuse. His self-medication of PTSD with alcohol, heroin, and then IV cocaine was partially successful, especially in controlling nightmares and flashbacks. Starting in 1975, he repeatedly sought treatment, with numerous hospitalizations and detox. On every occasion, withdrawal from alcohol and drugs was followed by a resurgence of PTSD symptoms. After completion of the most recent hospital drug abuse treatment, starting in May of 1988, he was transferred to a psychiatry unit, because of reemergence of PTSD symptoms. Previously he had been discharged with no PTSD treatment, only further drug abuse treatment. He was discharged from the psychiatry ward to a halfway house and referred to our specialized outpatient combat PTSD program. Following this final hospital admission Doc remained sober and “clean” for the next three years, until a single, fatal heroin overdose, shortly after his claim for a disability pension for combat PTSD was rejected.

The coroner signed off the overdose death as accidental, but I believe Doc was too sophisticated, both as a heroin addict and as a paramedic, not
to know that he had lost his drug tolerance during the long period of abstinence. His “normal” dose as a hard-core, daily IV heroin addict was a lethal dose to the recovered addict without a tolerance. I believe he intentionally killed himself in despair, anger, and humiliation after the value of his service was—in his eyes—“officially” rejected by the VA.

The masters of truth in the government bureaucracy followed “objective” procedures and observed “objective” criteria that led them to conclude that he had been disabled by his own “willful misconduct” in drug and alcohol abuse, not by psychological injury in the line of duty in service to his country and fellow soldiers. Whereas Linc died figuratively for a few years in quest of the absolute truth, Doc literally died by his own hand in response to what he apparently experienced as others' possession of the absolute truth—that his war service had not injured him, only his own misbehavior. He was humiliated and dishonored by the official action. The “masters of truth” had found him unworthy.

German veterans after defeat in World War I, who inhabited the absolute truth of the
“Dolchstoss von hinten”—
the “stab in the back” by traitors inside the government and the army—were willing to kill someone who said that Germany had been beaten fair and square by the British, French, and their late-coming allies, the Americans. They felt personally attacked and dishonored by the suggestion that they had been bested, rather than betrayed.
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Dishonor arouses the; desire to kill—self or others, sometimes both. Honor and dishonor are social processes, which declares “the truth” of a person's or group's worth. What kind of truth is it that induces an addicts craving for it when absent, as if for cocaine, and produces an arrogant, violent, paranoid state when possessed? I wish I could answer this question. It goes to the heart of extremist religious and political movements. We can recognize this lethal intoxication with absolute truth in Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and Jewish law student Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Veterans' tragic experiences render their own reckonings of ultimate truth and worth so very hard for them and so explosive. People will kill for it, and will die for it, as the metaphor of the bodies moldering in the Sirens' meadow shows.

Recall that Odysseus vowed to return to Circe's island to give Elpenor a proper burial. Circe wines and dines the crew and pulls Odysseus aside to give him more sailing instructions. She tells him about the Sirens' trap, and how to waltz past it using wax earplugs. Then she warns him of the narrow strait beyond: on the left are breakers, hull-tearing rocks, and a fearsome whirlpool called Charybdis; on the right is a sheer cliff, home to the cave-dwelling six-headed monster Scylla. The two deadly hazards are “side-by-side, an arrow-shot apart”
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across the strait. She advises him to make a dash for it under Scylla's lair, instead of losing the whole ship in the whirlpool. If he makes it through the strait, the next landfall is the sun god's cattle ranch on the island of Thrinacia. She repeats the warning Teiresias had given Odysseus in the Underworld not to touch the god's fat beef cattle.

Americans in Vietnam fought against the “finest light infantry in the world.”
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A part of what made them the finest was their mastery—even within their limited technologies and resources—of what is known as “combined arms.” This is the military competence and mental discipline to create a Scylla and Charybdis for the enemy, and doing it so fast or so unpredictably that the enemy loses his grip on the situation and freezes or panics and the attacked unit comes apart. It's no exaggeration to say that persistent, skillful use of combined arms drives the enemy insane. An American column of half-tracks on a road encounters mines—slow down and sweep the mines!—and at the same time a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades—speed through the killing zone as fast as you can! These two tactical responses, slowing down and speeding up, are incompatible, and both bad, Scylla and Charybdis. American infantry patrols encountered ambush sites where the vegetation on either side of the trail was prepared with punji stakes—concealed needle-sharp bamboo or metal stakes set in the ground or wooden planks pointing up—for the soldiers or marines to impale themselves on when they dove for cover to avoid rifle fire from their front Scylla and Charybdis.

Phaeacian Court

Raid on Ismarus

Lotus Land

Cyclops

King of the Winds

Deadly Fjord

Circe

Among the Dead

Sirens

Scylla and Charybdis

Sun God's Cattle

Whirlpool

Calypso

At Home, Ithaca

Some veterans I work with never allow themselves a moment of satisfied relaxation after successfully meeting any challenge, such as making the car payments, or fixing a burst washing machine hose, because, they say, there is always something more they have to prepare themselves to meet. Here again is the persistence into civilian life of adaptations that allowed the veteran to survive in battle.

As usual, Homer's gold is to be mined from details of the text. Circe counsels Odysseus—

Hug Scylla's crag—sail on past her—top speed! Better by far to lose six men and keep your ship Than lose your entire crew.

(12:118ff, Fagles)

Odysseus bridles at this coward's dash and asks her if he can't just steer away from the whirlpool and fight off the monster. To this she replies—

Must you have battle in your heart forever?
The bloody toil of combat? Old Contender,
will you not yield to the immortal gods?
That nightmare cannot die, being eternal
Evil itself—horror, and pain, and chaos;
there is no fighting her …
all that avails is flight.
Lose headway there
… while you break out arms,
and she'll swoop over you …
taking one man for every gullet.

(12:136-45, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

Circe tells Odysseus that apart from headlong flight, there is no chance of surviving an encounter with “eternal Evil itself.” She asks him if he must have battle in his heart forever, responding to
every
danger that the world presents with resort to heroic feats of arms. Even though Odysseus responds to her advice—remember, she is a minor goddess and knows what she's talking about—with a salute and a “Yes, Ma'am,” when he actually reaches the spot, he ignores her advice. His answer to her question whether he'll have battle in his heart forever is—yes. This quotation, along with Circe's perceptive picture of the veteran's “haggard spirit,” brings together so many elements of combat PTSD—battle forever, nightmare, eternal evil, the sense of helplessness—that I am tempted to smirk like the cat that swallowed the canary. After this, how can anyone
not
see the connection with combat veterans?

But like Odysseus, I go forward … Odysseus reaches the narrows,

But now I cleared my mind of Circe's orders—
Cramping my style, urging me not to arm at all
I donned my heroic armor.
…

(12:245ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

Now wailing in fear, we rowed up these straits,
Scylla to starboard, dreaded Charybdis off to port….
When she
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swallowed the sea surge down her gaping maw
the whole abyss lay bare and the rocks around her roared …
bedrock showed down deep, boiling
black with sand—
and ashen terror gripped the men.

But now, fearing death, all eyes fixed on Charybdis—
now Scylla snatched six men from our hollow ship.